Professor Rui Hua looks in his work at small people caught up in big legal systems. His setting is the borderland region of Manchuria, in Northeast Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century, as at least three imperial powers – China, Japan, and Russia – made monumental claims about sovereignty, law, and even the whole of the international order. Before this region erupted into war and revolution, individuals within it sought to make claims about what was right and just – claims that were cosmopolitan, drawing liberally and creatively upon great concepts from three legal systems. Professor Hua, in part, is looking at some of those claims and what they tell us about law and its development in the twentieth century.